The emotion, feeling and experience of love has been studied by poets, artists and philosophers for centuries in an attempt to understand what some would call the greatest of human emotions.
Now, science has arrived on the scene and is taking the understanding of love to a new level by attempting to construct a chemical formula that will explain this universal phenomenon called love.
So what makes the heart race and blood rush through the body, setting off chemical reactions at the mere sight of the object of one’s affection? Researchers say the early stages of romantic love can cause these reactions by stimulating the release of certain essential neurochemicals in the brain.
Romantic love is the most intense stage of love, said Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey who has studied love in cultures around the world. The other two love stages discussed by Fisher are attachment and lust, which are characterized by different chemical changes than those that occur in romantic love.
Fisher describes the romantic stage of love as obsessive and addictive and has found that it is more characteristic of a drive than it is an emotion, judging from the cravings and pleasures it induces.
“People die for love, live for love, kill for love,” Fisher said.
Romantic love has been found to be a more powerful drive than hunger, and in some cases, Fisher added, it can be more powerful than the drive to live.
This intensity of desire and need makes romantic love too metabolically expensive to last forever, Fisher said.
“The early stages of romantic love are not permanent,” she said.
In order to understand the fleeting nature of this love drive, Fisher conducted a study to see what the brain looks like in love.
The study consisted of 17 newly in-love college students who were shown a picture of their significant other and of a neutral friend while their brains were analyzed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
When viewing the picture of their partner, unique parts of their brains were activated that were not seen when they viewed a picture of a friend.
Parts of the brain containing high concentrations of dopamine receptors, the neurotransmitter responsible for inducing states of euphoria and addiction, were highly active when participants viewed images of their partners.
This heightened activity of dopamine accompanied by low levels of serotonin, the brain’s brake system, is known to cause hyperactivity and sleeplessness, which are very characteristic of romantic love, according to Fisher’s study.
These lovesick brains also were found to share many similarities in terms of brain activity with the brains of cocaine addicts.
The cravings, needs and pleasures experienced by lovers in romantic love provides proof of the observation that they bear resemblance to the compulsive behaviors of drug addicts, Fisher said in a study.
“In the beginning I was always anticipating and looking forward to the next time I would see (my boyfriend),” Shaili Pezeshki, a fourth-year communications student, said about her current relationship of more than one year. “My heart rate would go up and I would smile more than normal because I just couldn’t stop.”
She described, in the early stages, she felt a constant need to be close with her boyfriend while at the same time feeling completely overwhelmed by her own emotions.
Romantic love, Fisher said, can cause an array of emotional changes as described by Pezeshki, many of which are involuntary physiological reactions, in addition to psychological side effects such as emotional dependence, separation anxiety, and obsessive thinking.
From an evolutionary standpoint, she added, romantic love evolved in order for humans to focus their attention on one potential mate to conserve time and energy.
Attachment is the stage following romantic love, in good relationships, that keeps a couple together for long periods of time and gives them the ability to effectively raise offspring together.
Romantic love is too emotionally intense to persist over the years, Fisher added.
Pezeshki said that her relationship changed over time.
“It grew from that romantic and exciting love into something greater and more stable,” Pezeshki said, adding that her relationship evolved into a deep attachment and friendship with the benefit of being with someone that will stick with her and sacrifice for her.
“It is love when both people come second to themselves in a relationship,” Pezeshki said.
According to Thomas Scheff, professor emeritus of sociology from UC Santa Barbara, love is something even greater than attachment and obsession. Scheff’s research shows that love is an emphatic union where emotions are balanced and never one-sided.
“Love is genuine to the extent that each partner understands and values the other as much as themself, no more and no less,” Scheff said.
Hundreds of interpretations have been offered to capture the universally occurring phenomenon of love by scientists, artists and individuals.
The bottom line, Fisher said, is that even though all people have their own personalized interpretations for this drive or emotion, humans share the same underlying reactions that accompany the thing so many call love.